


Autumn's Threshold

by VivWiley



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, post-The End
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 17:07:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/801087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VivWiley/pseuds/VivWiley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Two are born to cross their paths, their lives, their hearts. If by chance one turns away, are they forever lost?</i> - The Cowboy Junkies </p><p>But this is not a song fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Autumn's Threshold

**Author's Note:**

> Timeframe: Post-The End, Pre-Fight The Future
> 
> Disclaimer: The characters and situations of The X-Files are the property of 1013 Productions and Fox Broadcasting. No infringement is intended; no profit will be made.

They had become road warriors. With the X-Files closed--again--they found themselves on permanent "other duties as assigned" details. And somehow those details were always somewhere other than Washington.

They were constantly on loan to other divisions, units, field offices. Occasionally given the courtesy title of "expert consults," more often they were simply a pair of temporary hired hands. Extra bodies thrown at investigations that had little hope of ever being closed, but that required the public impression of activity and purpose.

It seemed to Scully that they were actually caught in one of their own cases. She couldn't shake the memories of Pam, that strange, frightened girl who had described the bank robbery that had, apparently, become a repeating loop of tragic events, recurring over and over until somehow the outcome was made right. But her and Mulder's current situation, she thought, might be something that could never be set right. No matter what they managed to remember from one assignment to the next, there always seemed to be a dead body.

They were lost in a twilight zone of unresolvable cases. Agents without a brief. The Flying Dutchmen of the FBI. 

The idea of limbo haunted her. It felt as though somehow they were atoning for some unremarked, unremembered sin--the tantalizing prospect of someday being able to move on, up, away always just out of their reach.

Their world narrowed to an endless progression of airports, rental car counters, and hotel rooms that all looked pretty much the same. There was nothing but the same sterile travel environments, the case of the day, and each other.

Long past the stage of the common partner intimacies of knowing how the other drank coffee, they became, in this unending road show, virtually intertwined. They finished each others' sentences before they even started them. They ordered each others' meals, and could predict, absolutely, what the other would be wearing the next morning. 

She thought that in another couple of months Mulder would be able to perform autopsies, and she could take up profiling. For a while it was almost amusing. But then finally, in the vast, rolling space of the country, which they crisscrossed ceaselessly, it got to be too much--claustrophobic. 

In their closeness, they touched and bounced off each other, in small physical ways--walking down too narrow corridors, in the confinement of airplane seats. Their conversations, too, took on a physical quality of connection, a friction of idea against voice that was sometimes comforting and soothing, and sometimes irritating to the point of feeling like all her skin had been rubbed away. And always there was Mulder there, his presence, his voice. The one constant in her world of ever-slightly different cases in ever-slightly different towns.

Their travels took them in circles, and she felt as though her life had been thrown into the same endlessly repeating loop, always spiraling back on itself, and now when she turned and turned and looked for herself, she kept finding him there instead.

 

One late September morning she woke up in yet another unfamiliar room, and as had become her habit, her waking thought was, "What city am I in today?" She rolled over, to see on which side of the bed the clock was in this room, and realized, with a shock, that it was her own bed. And it was Saturday.

She flopped back on the pillows and contemplated the ceiling for a long, blank moment. Saturday, at home, and she was no longer sure what that meant.

Being who she was, the myriad chores and errands that had been postponed, forgotten and delayed throughout her travels immediately clamored into her mind. She began sorting, prioritizing--groceries, a birthday card for Amy, vacuuming, dusting, call her mother. A dozen whining, cranky voices competing in her brain for her attention. "Me first!" "No me!" 

And then a voice louder and clearer than the others cut through the din. "Nothing. Do nothing today." The voice was deep, seductive, commanding. It sounded like it belonged to another life entirely. It promised a day of real rest. Contemplation. The simple pleasure of no commitments, no obligations..

She closed her eyes, and listened to all the voices. Thought about the things and people she'd been neglecting. About all the things she *should* be doing. But that voice--the one that demanded a day of nothing--won out. She turned over and drifted back to sleep.

An hour or two later, she emerged from her sleep-in--the light in her room now mid-morning brightness, not the austere, disciplined light of dawn--and stretched indulgently, lazily. 

Nothing. What did that mean? Could it really mean doing nothing at all? She puttered around her kitchen, making coffee (she was glad she drank it black, any milk in her refrigerator would have gone bad three or seven trips ago), and toast (thank goodness she'd remembered to throw that loaf in the freezer). 

Out of habit, more than anything else, she got dressed and then flopped on her couch and tried to figure out how to do nothing. Her usual focused energy kicked in all too rapidly, and now she found herself itchy, restless. She needed to do something, but if she stayed here much longer, the dust, and empty refrigerator would get the better of her, and she'd wind up cleaning, going grocery shopping, and losing an entire day to the petty annoyances of being a single career woman.

She looked around her living room, noting the stale neatness of it, the dust motes dancing on the sunshine that streamed through the side window. The mostly unpacked suitcase waiting in the corner for the next trip.

She needed to get out, away. Ironic, really. All those months on the road, and all she had longed to do was be in her own home, and now that, for once, she had a day to do just that, she felt trapped. Some other time she would examine the tangled thicket of her psyche. Today she just needed to get out. To move. To travel on her own, through her own space and time.

Almost without thinking, she found herself throwing her hiking boots, a water bottle, and a sweatshirt in a backpack, and heading out to her car. Skyline Drive in the Shenadoah Mountains was only about 75 minutes away. It was still early enough. She could get out there and hike one of the shorter trails. 

The drive out was quick, and along the way she drifted into what she called her Traveler's Fugue. A state of consciousness where 90% of her brain was carefully concentrating on driving safely. The remaining 10%, however, was mulling over decisions, facts, emotions that didn't yet have names or shapes, but which were gradually coalescing into some conclusion that she thought might very well reshape part of her world. Since the constant traveling with Mulder had started some months ago, something nebulous had been shaping itself in the back of her head. Settling into odd nooks and crevices of her mind, and only if she turned suddenly, caught the light at an oblique angle did the glint of something possibly precious glint through the shadows.

She got to the parking lot for the Stony Man Mountain hike, and emerged from her fugue to discover, with a shock, that she had driven into Autumn. She was surrounded by trees burnished yellow, maroon, and orange. The ground littered with the preparatory confetti of a coming winter. How had it already turned to Fall without her knowing it? She shook her head, bemused. She had lost an entire season while traveling--one more casualty of this strange life of theirs. Hers. This strange life of hers. It was still her life.

She laced up her boots and picked up her pack. She'd stopped on the way in, and bought some bread, cheese and apples, and she had planned to picnic at the summit of the trail.

Starting the ascent up the mountain, she felt blurry--out of focus. The discovery of the season had unsettled her equilibrium. She'd had plans for this fall. And now it had arrived with no warning, and she was at a loss to decide how to react.

Fall had always been her favorite season. She'd spent more than half her life in school, and Fall had always seemed like the real beginning of the year. The time when life transitioned from one clear moment to the next. It was the time to make plans. To start projects.

And she had planned...well, that was the sticking point. She knew, somehow, that she had planned a start of something this Fall, but she had never quite gotten around to defining what it was she would start. She had had the sense, through the Summer, of thunder clouds massing on the far horizon. A sense of a change coming, something momentous, something that would sweep across her life, and transform her landscape. She had intended to prepare, to gather her strength and figure out the weather patterns. But now she knew only that this season of transition had arrived without warning and she had been caught unaware. Unprepared. She hated that.

She climbed higher, pushing herself. The cool sharp air was light on her face, and she could feel the faintest traces of sweat beginning on the skin of her back, her body warming in the sun and with the force of her movements. The loose rocks on the path slid around her feet, forcing her to pay attention to her steps as she moved around the next curve.

Curve. Turn. Turning. The last five years, she thought, had been nothing but turns, curves, rocky paths, with the unexpected always lurking around the next bend. Well, that was a little melodramatic. But it was fair, she conceded, that she could say that there had been an ongoing transition in her life ever since she'd started on the X-Files. Since she'd met Mulder. 

She hiked on, greeting the handful of other hikers she met on the path, casually exchanged salutations, "Hey" and "How are you?" It struck her that this was evidence of another shift in her life. Her relationship with the rest of the human race had been reduced to these transitory contacts--fleeting words exchanged as she brushed by people she had never seen before and would never see again. Through it all, the circle of people with whom she had once maintained contact had been narrowed, and narrowed, until there was really only Mulder.

Mulder.

She carried his name in her mind for a while. Turning it over and over, feeling the edges and facets of his name and all the echoes it held. Then she cast it out. A stone thrown into a still pool, the waves spreading out, quiet symmetry, toward unseen shores. Questions rippling out from the center. How had this come to be her life? 

This section of the path was shaded by old, towering trees. The crisp smoky scent of evergreens was a pleasant counterpoint to the crunch of the leaves underfoot. It was good to just walk. To see the world around her. The world that went on without regard to aliens or conspiracies or departmental politics. 

Was it possible, anymore, for her to simply go on without regard to all those things? Could she make a turning away from all the craziness of life on the X-Files? It would be too easy to make this hike into a metaphor - a climbing out of the shadows that shrouded her life toward a different summit - a different view of the world. Things weren't that simple, though. She had long ago acquired a life that defied metaphor. Anyway, she was a scientist, and not prone to such fancies. Usually.

But there were questions, and as a scientist, answering questions was what drove her, it was her vocation and her passion. She had long ago seen that there was an order to the world, and by asking the right questions, you could name and describe what was around you. You could make sense of those things that at first seemed like magic.

That view had been challenged over the years, but she had clung to her stubborn beliefs in science and the possibility of rationality, and she still believed in order, logic, reason and answers. She had not yet given up hope that she could find answers. She still believed that she could sort through the detritus of the insanity that seemed to engulf her, and find the truth hidden in the ashes.

The questions that swirled smoke-like around her today, though, refused to settle into solid entities. They brushed by her shoulders and hovered just out of reach. They hung in the peripheral vision of her mind's eye and would not be coaxed out into the light to be confronted. So, she pushed them away, and kept climbing.

At the summit, she found a boulder to lean against, spreading her jacket to sit on, as she drank her water, and ate her late lunch. The sun was past its zenith, but still bright and benevolent. As always, she was unprepared for the uncomplicated beauty of the Blue Ridge, facing her across the valley. The slight haze hanging about the peaks giving them the smoky color from which they took their name. 

Each time she looked at the mountains, she felt as though she were seeing them for the first time. The startling newness always accompanied by a deep shock of knowing. A sense that she had known these mountains, and needed them for longer than she had had a name. Every time she saw them, she promised herself that she would stop taking them for granted, would come to see them, appreciate their splendor more often.

Their ancient presence settled around her, quieting her inner turmoil, her unfocused search, until there was nothing but the sound of her breaths, and the silent answer of her heart.

On the return hike she didn't see any other hikers, and it seemed to her that she reached her car almost as soon as she began her descent. 

She drove back toward DC as the day began ending. She was driving east, so the apricot-bronze fire of the sunset reflected in her rearview mirror. The temptation to look back was so strong, but she was moving forward, and couldn't afford even the distraction of such spectacular, fleeting beauty. Her destination was in front of her. 

She found herself at his door almost without realizing that she'd driven there instead of her own home. She knocked and waited, wondering exactly what it was she was going to say.

She heard his footsteps approaching, and was surprised when he opened the door without any pause to indicate that he'd checked who might be surprising him on this Saturday evening. Later she'd wonder if he thought she was the pizza delivery man.

"Scully." Almost a question. Almost an answer. He waited, his eyes filled with a puzzled patience, as though the answer to a long-pondered riddle might be in front of him.

And now she found herself without words. Not that there had ever been many words between them, particularly lately when it felt as though they sometimes communicated to each other with invisible heatwaves that radiated out from their skins. 

She drew a breath to ask if she could come in, knowing that that was the wrong question, but uncertain of what else to say. A sudden doubt seized her. Why was she here? What had brought her here? Something rooted her to the spot, and without conscious thought, she reached out and placed a hand lightly on his chest. Just over his heart.

He tilted his head, and something shifted deep in his eyes, a sudden spark of light and warmth, and something deeper than that. A steely joy. He carefully took her hand in his own, and without breaking eye contact with her, gently kissed her fingers. 

He waited until she found her voice. 

"Mulder." And it was an answer.

 

END


End file.
